Always Late? It's Because You Have an Incurable Medical Condition

A British man who's perpetually tardy has been diagnosed with chronic lateness. No, seriously. Doctors say 57-year-old Jim Dunbar's (pictured, above) has suffered from the disease (is it a disease?) for all of his life, but they can't treat him because the condition is incurable. Sounds deadly.

Late for work, late for football matches, late for holidays. He’s left women stood waiting on a first date, turned up to meals with friends hours after he should have and even arrived for funerals long after they’ve begun. But the 57-year-old says that it isn’t his fault after his poor timekeeping was diagnosed as a medical condition — at a Ninewells hospital appointment he was half-an-hour late for. Despite his chronic lateness diagnosis, Jim, who has spent most of his life living in Fintry, still struggles to arrive on time as he tackles the incurable condition. Recently Jim, who now lives in Forfar, tried to go to the cinema. Knowing that it could be a problem getting to Dundee’s DCA for a 7pm show, he gave himself an 11-hour head-start. He arrived 20 minutes late. Dundee United fan Jim said: “I got up at 8:15am to go to a David Bowie film at the DCA that started at seven o’clock. “That gave me 11 hours to get ready. I knew I was going there — and I was 20 minutes late. I get down about it and it’s disturbing for other folk when you arrive late.” In his livingroom, the former Dundee City Council worker has a special clock that uses radio frequencies tuned to a national transmitter to make sure that the time it displays is always exactly right, down to the second. It doesn’t help. He has tried wearing a watch, setting his clocks fast and trying to arrive at places early, but still hasn’t found a solution. [...] Jim’s condition affects the same part of the brain as Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and means that he cannot properly gauge how long things take. He says that consistently being late has caused him to lose dozens of jobs over the years. Jim said: “The reason I want it out in the open is that there has got to be other folk out there with it and they don’t realise that it’s not their fault. I blamed it on myself and thought: ‘Why can’t I be on time?’. I lost a lot of jobs. I can understand people’s reaction and why they don’t believe me. It is really depressing sometimes. I can’t overstate how much it helped to say it was a condition.”